Month: March 2014

Ansible has a dedicated module to manage public keys; the authorized_key module. It’s a very nice module, with enough flexibility to do almost anything I can think of.

However, it does have one very annoying thing. While I was migrating our automation scripts to ansible; I got to the point where I was working on the script that provisions our users. By default, we disabled all password authentication and root SSH access. Only key based access is allowed.

I found that I have to actually put the public SSH key strings inside the playbook vars. That’s just not cool. SSH keys are long, they might have specific options (although the authorized_key module allows you to configure that) and it’s harder to maintain the list of keys like this. So, I tried to work around this. My target was to add the public SSH keys for my users as static files in an ansible role. Basically, I will be populating my my group_vars files by reading files inside my roles.

First, I added the public key files in the ‘files‘ directory of the role I was using to configure the users.

Now, I have to find a way to “read” the key files and set them in the vars file. Fortunately, ansible provides Lookup plugins that allows me to do just that!